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SSDs Replacing Hard Disks? Not Anytime Soon (and Here's Why)

Posted 09/22/08 at 04:58:03 PM  by Mark Edward Soper

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SSDs won't replace hard disks anytime soon

While SSDs are getting plenty of attention from us (and everyone else) these days, it's way too early to shovel the dirt over the classic spinning-disk hard disk drive technology, eWeek suggests. You already know a couple of reasons: capacity and price per GB.

While 2.5-inch drives from Western Digital and Seagate broke the 500GB barrier last week, the biggest SSDs on the portable market are the 128GB Samsung drives and the forthcoming 160GB SSDs from Intel. SSDs don't come cheap, either: expect to pay $500-600 more for a laptop with an SSD onboard compared with a standard hard disk.

However, even if you can afford to give up some storage capaciy and a lot more cash, there are other reasons to think twice before turning your existing hard disk drive into a paperweight. At last week's DiskCon 2008 storage conference, experts cited by eWeek pointed out that NAND flash memory, the most common type of flash memory in use today, drops in performance with use, and that data retention is much shorter than with traditional disk drives.

So who's really excited about SSDs? Corporate data centers. In one case study described at DiskCon, a data center replaced hard disks with SSDs. The installation used one SSD for read, the other for write, and realized a 10x improvement in read/write speed and 5x less power consumption.

So, how do you feel about SSDs? Are you ready to pony up the extra dough and trade off some capacity to give SSDs a try today, or are you waiting until SSDs' price per GB, capacity and long-term behavior more closely mirror what hard disks provide today? Hit the Comments button and sound off.

Illustration adapted from Wikimedia under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 license.

COMMENTS:7
TAGS: storage, laptops, consumer electronics, ssd, solid-state drive, Desktops, hard disk, comparison
COMMENTS
avatarHDD vs. SSD

Submitted by wk on Tue, 09/23/2008 - 9:28am

beside performance. SSD main feature should be durability especially in notebooks, if that not the case, why paying extra.

MPC is my home page

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avatarNever Buying Until They're Stable

Submitted by statewd on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 6:43pm

I've had enough strife over buying something when it first comes out that I now have learned to just wait a few years.  I don't think the SSDs are even stable enough to last 3 years (if that).  There were a high percentage that were DOA (or would quit working after a couple months) when they were first introduced, and I think this is still happening now.

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avatarmore companies should push

Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 3:07pm

more companies should push hybrid drives. seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

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avatarEh...

Submitted by Dysthymia on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 3:05pm

1,000 to 10,000 writes? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive) How long is that gonna last me? I'd be a lot more willing to purchase something like the X25-M if I weren't looking at a limitation like that.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15433/3

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avatarI agree....

Submitted by knexkid on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 4:24pm

I have had this older 200 gig HDD for almost 6 or so years (holds my music and misc crap).  I assumed that with no moving parts SSDs would last for an extreamly long time, but I guess I am wrong.  If I had two computers, one with a SSD, and one with a normal HDD, which drive would poop out first, assuming you are doing the exact same ammount of reading/writing on both?  I don't want to buy a drive only for it to last a few years until the memory is no longer usable. 

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avatarWow and I thought being an

Submitted by StarWolf on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 2:53pm

Wow and I thought being an American wasn't being a greedy cake stealing know it all?

And really for me, I say performance is crucial. The hard drive is the slowest thing compared to any other part of the computer.

I really would not mind getting rid of some storage for faster performance. That is why I would get 2 x SSD HDs with 2 x Terabyte drives. The 2 SSD drives raided and the 2 Terabyte drives also raided seperately for storage. And to be honest SSDs smoke Raptors! Look at some reviews please! It all depends on the SSD you get that will determine speed.

Why the hell do you need a terabyte SSD ATM, it is a bit much.

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avatarSSD's? What happened to

Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 2:44pm

SSD's? What happened to holographic storage that was supposed to be available in 2007?

SSD's won't really be all that until they reach capacities of at least a terabyte and performance on par with a pair of velociraptors in a raid array. Yes I want my cake and eat it too. I deserve it I'm an american.

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